Sending Mixed Signals

DRIVING home from the office, you're listening to your favourite music on your car radio in stereo, presented by a disc jockey who is either so offensive he gets your hackles up or witty enough to bring forth a chuckle. Your smile widens as somebody from Jhumritalaiya rings up the radio station to place a song request. Suddenly, the programme is interrupted: Delhi's dcp (Traffic) Maxwell Pereira comes on, warning you not to take the India Gate roundabout because a rally is being held there. As you take a detour, it is to the tune of any of the following: a recital by Bhimsen Joshi; the Top Twenty hits on mtv; songs from Subhash Ghai's latest movie; golden songs from the hmv collection or Mozart.

Such a scenario isn't just a pipe-dream. The only hitch is that with the kind of mixed signals coming from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, it could take anything between two and 20 years. At one level, the i&b Ministry is working on a note recommending the setting up of private radio stations. At another, it has cold-shouldered the recommendations of the Air Time Committee of India (atci) on the Frequency Modulation (fm) channels in the four metros-Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.

The atci has recommended a 20-hour stereo channel in each metro, complete with disc jockeys and with music as its mainstay. Thrown in will be information on road traffic, air and train timings. However, in the wake of what the i&b Ministry has done to the Metro tv channel, radio professionals are apprehensive about the fate of these recommendations. In any case, they are sceptical about the financial viability of the proposed channels.

Even as the ministry picks holes in the atci report-it has already said that the Government will decide the amount of time available on the chan-nel, and that the structure of the programmes and the manner of their presentation should be left to the slot-holder-a curious development has taken place: from February 24, All India Radio (air) has extended, in Delhi only, its special fm transmission from one-and-a-half hour to eleven-and-a-half hours. The move has raised eyebrows: air officials in charge of the channel say they're being made to rush into this without any planning and preparation and without any extra staff or funds. In the circumstances, the officials add, there is no way the channel can be very different from the other air channels. Says an official: "By rushing into this, the powers-that-be have converted a grand idea into a pedestrian one." For his part, air Director-General Shashi Kapoor says that this had been planned quite some time ago.

The upshot is that the extended fm service in Delhi hasn't even caused a ripple. The fm service in the three other metros is even more pathetic: Bombay has only one hour of stereo traxismission daily, whereas Calcutta and Madras have nothing except a relay of programmes from air's medium-wave channels. Contrast this with the enviable situation in the West, where most major cities have dozens of such channels, providing everything from entertainment to news to local community services and traffic reports.

Ever since air launched its fm service in 1977, it has been a story of mindless expansion without the software to sustain it. Today, air has 43 district-level fm stations, and 24 more are in the pipeline. Each station is supposed to cater to local needs and to originate three hours of programming every day. But many of these stations are short of staff-Surat, Patiala, Chhitor-garh and Jhalawar, for instance, do not even have station directors. Even when the staff is there, the station has few listeners: fm radio sets are either not available, or are too costly. As the average cost of each such station is about Rs 6 crore, the Government has virtually wasted a fortune. The colossal waste of funds is not confined to establishment of the centres but Rs 15 lakh to Rs 30 lakh is spent annually for the maintenance of a station and its staff.

A NDHRA Pradesh illustrates this waste. The regional station in the X JL caal town of Kothagudem in Khammam district is being received by only 500 fm sets, in a population of five lakh. Thus the Rs4-crore station, which has 54 employees on its rolls and an annual expenditure of Rs 50 lakh, is addressing a void. "It's like playing the proverbial flute before a buffalo," says an air official. Similarly, the35-member station in Warangal town reaches out to hardly 1,000 households. According to a study done by air in 1991, only two to three per cent of the 7,09,320 sets in the Hyderabad zone had the fm facility.

It is against this backdrop that the Government had set up the atci to suggest ways of allotting time-slots on the fm channel to private companies. While welcoming the atci scheme as a step in the right direction, independent radio professionals have one major reservation about it: who will provide the money needed to sustain the channel for the first year or two? Unlike television, where several big companies have positioned themselves over the years, radio has only independent professionals. While some of them have their own audio studios, none is in a position to take financial risks.

The consensus is that a basic one hour music-based programme, presented by a disc jockey, will cost the producer at least Rs 10,000. According to atci recommendations, the producer will have to pay another Rs 5,000 every hour to air as licence fee. Clearly, on a channel that is starting from scratch, the producer will not be able to even recover his money through advertising initially. But atci Chairman P.S. Deodhar, does not agree: "Every one-hour slot can have up to six minutes of advertising. Or 36 slots of 10 seconds each. At Rs 500 for every 10 seconds, the producer will get Rs 18,000."

Radio man Amin Sayani, however, sees advertising revenue more in terms of Rs 500 per minute rather than every 10 seconds. "On a new channel, the ad rate will have to be one-fourth than that of the primary channel," he says. The current Vividh Bharati rate is Rs 3 00 for every 10 seconds on all the four metros together (it will go up to Rs 366 from July this year). On its popular Chitralok music programme which has a high listenership, however, the sponsorship of each song costs Rs 5,000 (to go up to Rs 6,000 from July this year).

Except for music-based programmes like Chitralok, or Lux Sitaron ki Sargam and hmv ke Sitare, which attract a fair number of sponsors, the other programmes on air are not so comfortably placed. For instance, air is finding it difficult to get sponsors for its plays. Says Vinod Sharma (more famous as Inspector Eagle): "My last two plays for air- Mritunjay and Begum ka Takiya-both had problems finding sponsors." When this is the situation on the main channels, say radio professionals, how will a new fm channel survive? They further point out that while sponsors dish out between Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 for a half-hour music-based programme on air, and air itself provides between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000 for a play, on a new channel such amounts will not be forthcoming.

Indian radio professionals working abroad are far more confident of sustaining the initial losses. Two such people are Jaswinder Singh, a bbc journalist, and Avtar Lit, who runs four 24-hour radio stations in the UK. Both plan to bid for a 24-hour fm channel in India. The ideal situation, they say, will be if the Government allows them to set up their own transmitters. Failing that, they are keen on taking the complete 24-hour slot on the proposed Metro channel. If that is also denied, they plan to come to India via satellite.

Singh, who is trying to form a cooperative of Indian radio journalists working for foreign networks, plans to launch the channel through NRI-back-ing. "It won't be difficult to raise the half-a-million dollars (Rs 1.5 crore) needed to sustain the channel for the first year," he says. About 60 per cent of this money, he adds, will be needed for the hardware: a state-of-the-art digital audio studio, and a private fm transmitter. Lit plans to do the same, the only difference being that his budget estimate is half-a-million pounds (Rs 2.25 crore) a year. Both Singh and Lit point out that the channel will be economically viable for them only if they are allowed to operate it 24 hours a day. Says Singh: "If merely a time-slot chunk is given, no one wijl come forward to do current affairs programmes, which can only be subsidised by advertisement revenue raised from entertainment programmes."

If the fm service takes off. there will be a couple of fringe benefits. The fm signal carries a "sub-carrier", which can be used for paging and information services. All subscribers will need to do is to buy a portable paging device, on which they will be able to receive messages even when they are on the move. Similarly, they can get information such as the latest stock-market figures in the form of radio-text, thanks to fm.

But right now the problem is that India does not even have enough fm sets. Because fm has been unused, most Indian radio-manufacturing companies have not bothered to provide the facility in their sets. In 1988, the Electronics Commission had come out with an fm set priced at only Rs 250. but the set did not take off because fm did not.

With the fresh initiatives, radio could still be revived. The question-as always-is whether the Government is serious about giving up partial control on what has been its monopoly.with M.A. MANNAN in Hyderabad

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